Introduction

Servers are the backbone of the internet, without them, it simply wouldn't exist! Recently more and more people have been looking to run servers themselves, turning your home PC into a server so that people from all over the world can access it is both a rewarding but risky task... There are obvious security concerns involved when anyone in the world with access to a net connection can connect to your PC! The aim of this tutorial is to give you the very basics of how to set up a home server on a Windows based machine, we will just get it up and running, making sure it is operating securely and functioning at its optimum is a task we leave to you.

What exactly this tutorial will be... a guide on how to get yourself (a free) domain name with which to access your server, a guide on how to set up Apache so that your server will send web pages to computers that try to access it and lastly setting up FileZilla FTP server so that people can connect to your server via FTP.

Getting a domain name

This step involves assigning your IP address to a domain name. For instance, if your IP address is 192.168.0.1 it is hard to remember and less aesthetically pleasing to have that as the address that people access your server from. First we need to find out your current IP address, this is simple, go to a site such as this and it will tell you. Next go to www.dyndns.org and assign a name to your IP address... you sign up for a free account, you can have up to five addresses free of charge (at time of writing). Once you've signed up, go to your account, then click on the "Add Host" link next to "Dynamic DNS" simply choose a name for your server and select a domain from the list, enter your IP address where it says. That's it! You will now be able to access your IP from the address you specified.

Apache

Apache is by far the most popular HTTP server software in existence, it is multi award winning and secure, best of all it's free! Download the latest version of Apache from this page: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. I recommend getting the MSI installer for Windows as it is the simplest way to get things running.

You May Also be looking for an Smtp Server soon after setting up your website.

Smtp Servers Alow your Website to To send mail out to the internet they are good to have when you have user registestration on your website.

Postcast server is free and works well on most systems:
http://www.postcast.com/

this is a very basic home server if you have any questions then please feel free to ask.

Another excellent piece of home server software is Uniform Server. It is run by Apache, and comes preinstalled with MySQL and PHP5 (downgradable to PHP4) and can be easily used as a development server (I have it set up on my home computer to test my scripts, I even have phpBB 2.0.17 installed!).

Xampp is also another good server installation. It's got Apache, PHP4 and PHP5, Pear, Perl, MySQL, OpenSSL, and a whole bunch of other things.

It's available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

Their website is apache friends - xampp

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Rohan

p.s. Nice tutorial btw